Read The Warmth of Other Suns Online
Authors: Isabel Wilkerson
“You take care, Dr. Foster.”
“And you as well.”
Back at the house, he boils water for tea. He seems calm and at peace, distant now from the multiple recountings of the hard trek he made to get to California. He has thought things through and seems to have figured out his thinking now.
“I wanted to prove to them that I was worthy of a room,” he says of his rejection along his journey. “I was not sure that I was good enough to be admitted. What good had it done me to get all this education and work as a surgeon in the army?”
“Have you ever been back through that stretch?” I ask him.
“Never,” he shoots back. “I drove back south, but I went through Oklahoma.”
He pauses and considers the effect his migration had on how he lived out the rest of his life and how he raised his daughters. He had demanded more of them than might have been necessary. He became obsessed with appearances and spent a fortune on their clothes and breeding so that there would be no reason for them to be rejected as he had been.
“I gave my daughters ballet so they could know how to walk,” he said, “and create the picture I wanted. I wanted them to have an excellent education. I didn’t want them to suffer the pains of racism. I didn’t want them to have to sit in the back of the bus, suffer the unwelcome attention of low-class whites. I didn’t want them to be open to being molested.”
Unlike other parents raised in the South, he had never drilled into his children the hardships he had endured or dwelled on the limits of what they could or could not do based on the color of their skin. It was a strategy that worked beautifully in producing young women of grace and refinement but left them knowing little about the rituals and folk wisdom and history of the South or, in the end, that part of their father.
He remade himself in California and still does not fully know what to make of the place.
“It seemed like a fairyland the way they painted the picture,” he says, “and I bought it.”
“What do you think now?” I ask him.
“It’s not the oasis that I thought it was,” he says, “but I’ve got over that, too.”
He pauses and considers the options of a stifled life under the deadly combination of Jim Crow and “little-townism,” as he calls it, if he had stayed in Monroe or even Atlanta.
“I don’t think I could have done any better,” he finally says.
Robert has a taste for collard greens and corn bread, and we go to his favorite soul food restaurant in Inglewood, over by Crenshaw and Manchester, run by some people from Mississippi. He orders up yams and collards and smothered chicken and remembers that it was here that he sat when the riots over the Rodney King verdict broke out in May 1992. He remembers telling the waitress to wrap everything up.
“Let me get out of here,” he told her. He turned north on Crenshaw and raced to get back home.
On this day four years later, the streets of his beloved adopted city are quiet, and Robert is momentarily back in the South with the comfort food of his youth. When it’s time to leave, I prepare to take him home, but he tells me he’d rather be dropped off somewhere else. He wants to go to Hollywood Park racetrack, which all too conveniently happens to be right around the corner from the restaurant. He assures me he will have a way to get home. On the short ride to the track, he talks about how it feels, just going into a casino, which, for him, is more than a casino, but freedom itself.
“I walk into a casino,” he says, “and I act like I own it.”
Walking in like that attracts just the kind of attention he craves.
“What kind of surgeon
are
you?” a man asked him once, having heard he was a doctor.
“A damn good one,” Robert told the man with a smile.
We arrive at the track, and Robert gets out of the car in his windbreaker and pensioner’s slacks. He looks up at the exterior of the track, which looms high above him like a coliseum. He is a regal man, small-boned and slight in stature, and he looks out of place given his bearing and pedigree. But he quickens his step the closer he gets to the entrance. I watch him to make sure he gets in alright until he disappears into the crowd. He does not look back but straight ahead, as if he owns the place.
That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have
.
20
—D
ANIEL
P
ATRICK
M
OYNIHAN
,
The Negro Family
THE HARLEM THAT GEORGE STARLING FLED
to in 1945 no longer exists. The Savoy Ballroom closed its doors in 1958. Small’s Paradise closed in 1986, its patrons now frail and the children of the Migration not dressing up and dancing the Lindy Hop late into the night. The Sunday stroll died off with the top hat. The black elites—the surgeons and celebrities who would have made their homes on Sugar Hill in previous generations—can now move wherever they want. Many of them live in Westchester or Connecticut now.
The magnificent brownstones are aging and subdivided. Urban pioneers have only recently begun to turn them around. The streets have been given over to teenagers with boom boxes, to crack dealers and crack addicts, prostitutes and soapbox preachers, wig shops and liquor stores, corner stores selling single cigarettes for a nickel apiece and homeless people pushing their worldly possessions in shopping carts down what is no longer Lenox Avenue but Malcolm X Boulevard.
George Starling has lived in Harlem for half a century and knows and loves it in spite of itself. Many of the people who came up from the
South have passed away. There are fewer and fewer old-timers left. Still he makes his way around with a sense of ownership and belonging. He has lived there for longer than most of the people around him have been alive.
It has gotten to the point that his mind is still sharp but he can’t drive anymore on account of his eyesight, and his knees fairly creak as he negotiates the steps to the basement apartment of his brownstone on 132nd Street.
When he returns home in the evening from church or the grocery store, and if someone happens to stop to talk to him, someone who, say, maybe has not been seen on the block before, a voice might holler out from across the street in the dark. It is a neighbor watching out for him.
“You alright, Mr. G.? Everything alright, Mr. George?”
“Yeah, I’m alright.”
“Okay. We just want to be sure.”
Back in 1950, on the occasion of Harlem’s fiftieth anniversary as a black community, the
New York Age
asked residents why they had moved to Harlem and why they stayed.
An ice vendor was one of the people who responded. “I know everybody in my block,” he said, “and I don’t think I want to go anywhere else to live, until I go to heaven.”
21
George Starling knows how the ice vendor felt. As hard as the going has been up in Harlem, he has been free to live out his life as he chooses, been free to live, period, something he had not been assured of in Florida in the 1940s. He has made his mistakes, plenty of them, but he alone has made them and has lived with the consequences of exercising his own free will, which could be said to be the very definition of freedom.
A neighbor passes and yells, “Hey, Mr. George!” He smiles and nods and lifts his hand in the neighbor’s direction.
Despite all the changes, it is still a neighborhood with its own sense of order and kinship.
“The people around here know more what’s going on over here than I do,” he says of his brownstone.
Anyone coming up to his door might face an inquiry.
“He know you?” somebody might ask on George’s behalf.
When he was still driving, the crack addicts and prostitutes—or, more precisely, the addicts who were prostituting themselves to get more cocaine—would approach him as he pulled up to the curb.
“You need some company tonight?”
“No, darling, I don’t need no company tonight.”
Sometimes they come to him with good news, knowing how upright he carries himself.
“I’m going to school now, Mr. G.,” they’ll say. “Can you give me two dollars for some cigarettes?”
He looks them over and sees that they are only telling him what they think he wants to hear. “They come up, and they look like they just came out a garbage can,” he says, shaking his head.
School is something he takes seriously because he hadn’t been able to complete his own education. He calls them on it.
“Yeah? How long you been in school?”
They might not have an answer, but he gives them a couple dollars anyway.
“I give it to you Tuesday,” they assure him.
“You don’t owe me,” George tells them. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get mad with you when you don’t pay me back.”
Sometimes they come up to him to report their progress, as if he were everybody’s grandfather, and they feel the need to prove themselves to him.
“I just dropped out of rehab, but I’m going right back,” they’ll say, even though George can see full well that they can’t be in rehab if they are running up and down the street as they have been all these months.